The Awesomeness of All Souls

Solemnity of All Souls

"As gold in the furnace, he proved them,
and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself.
In the time of their visitation they shall shine,
and shall dart about as sparks through stubble;
they shall judge nations and rule over peoples,
and the LORD shall be their King forever."
--Wisdom 3:6-8
 
Today is not a Holy Day of Obligation, as was yesterday's Solemnity of All Souls.  A reader of Father Christian Mathis' Blessed is the Kingdom blog suggests that "obligation" is a horrible word and the Church should replace the term with something else, perhaps "Holy Day of Awesome" (found this via the also-always-awesome Ironic Catholic).  I agree wholeheartedly, and though the magisterium has not deemed it such, I find All Souls to be fairly awesome as well.
 
The Lectionary provides no less than three options for Old Testament readings today, three options for psalms, thirteen options for the epistle, and twelve options of Gospel readings.  I don't think there's another feast day in the Christian calendar with this many possible Mass readings.  What's going on here?
 
The answer is that the Bible is absolutely teeming with glorious messages about the peace, joy, and eternal happiness that awaits those who die in the faith.  Fewer teachings are as clear from scripture as this: the life we see here in front of us is only the beginning.  All those who have preceded us in Christ await our arrival and shower us with their own prayers and blessings, even now. 
 
I don't say this to diminish in any way the sadness and loss we feel for those who have died.  Growing up, I was never especially comfortable with funeral sermons that chastised mourners for their tears, as if grief were somehow incompatible with faith in life after death.  St. Augustine found no such conflict:

Therefore the Apostle [Paul] did not exhort us not to be sorrowful, but only not to be like "others who have no hope.'' We grieve, then, over the necessity of losing our friends in death, but with the hope of seeing them again. This necessity causes us anguish, but the hope consoles us; our infirmity is tried by the one, and our faith is strengthened by the other: on the one hand our human condition sorrows, on the other the divine promise is our salvation.

As Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, points out, love means attachment, not of the selfish kind, but of the holy kind, and so in our loving humanity we grieve for those who have left us.  But we are not beyond consolation, because we know our loved ones have only left us for a time.  This is both the scandal and the hope of our faith.  Those who profess a gross materialist understanding of reality have no such hope.  For them, death is the end, and so there is no greater meaning to our day-to-day suffering than what we give it.
 
For Christians, every moment of our lives is a moment of freedom understood from the perspective of eternity.  We still suffer, experience loss and hurt, but that is not the end of the story, and every mundane daily task, every frustration, and ever moment of grief is experienced within the context of our cosmic journey into the arms of God, where we shall know and be known, as we have been among our brothers and sisters in life, and far beyond our wildest dreams in the Life to Come.
 
All souls in heaven, pray for us.